Second, the size of the Chinese domestic market provides important advantages when it comes to innovation.

AI is built on big data, and because of its vast number of internet users, China has caught up to the US at an unexpected pace.

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Economies of scale allow quicker recovery of R&D and tooling expenditure, translating into a cost advantage over rivals, especially in sectors requiring heavy front-end investments such as hi-speed rail, nuclear power plants, solar panels, power turbines, electric vehicles and drones.

China's advantage is no longer low-cost labour but its enormous pool of hands-on technicians and engineers able to turn blueprints into prototypes, sometimes in a matter of days.

Nevertheless, there is nothing original or unique about the Chinese development model.

Indeed, this state-led model was practised by the United States, Britain, France and Germany, too, during the 19th century and first half of the 20th centuries, as Cambridge economist Ha-Joon Chang points out.

Consider president Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal programmes to spur the US economy in the 1930s, or French state ownership of and intervention in key industry sectors up until today.

Even China's authoritarian, one-party rule is nothing extraordinary; Taiwan, South Korea and Singapore were equally authoritarian.

South Korea saw rapid economic growth under presidents Park Chung-hee and Chun Doo-hwan, both military men who restricted civil liberties and controlled the judicial system, while Taiwan's economic miracle happened under one-party rule and martial law was not lifted until 1987.

Singapore has effectively been a one-party state since 1965 and the same could be said of Japan, under the Liberal Democratic Party since 1955 (except for brief hiatuses in 1993-1994 and 2009-2012).

One-party rule with a competent bureaucracy can enable stable, long-term policy planning and execution.

This advantage is starkly illustrated by Taiwan, whose economy has floundered since the mid-1990s as frequent changes of government and policies deter investors and undermine the morale of civil servants no longer certain if their work will have any lasting effect.

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Chinese business sense first caught the attention of Europeans in the colonies of Southeast Asia.

British colonial officer Francis Light observed that “they possess the different trades of carpenters, masons, and smiths, are traders, shopkeepers and planters … [and] are the only people of the East from whom a revenue can be raised without expense and extraordinary efforts of Government…”

American anthropologist and explorer David P. Barrows considered the way “their keen sense for trade and their indifference to physical hardship and danger, make the Chinese almost a dominant factor whenever political barriers have not been raised against their entry”.

Confucian virtue can be compared to the Weberian Protestant ethic. The Chinese language is full of maxims exhorting learning and hard work, and anyone who has been to China will not fail to notice the way hardship is accepted as a normal part of life.

Barbers are on their feet 12 hours a day while the repair of shoes and clothing to mobile phones and computers is easily and affordably available.

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In 1882, US Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act which effectively barred Chinese from the United States for several decades.

The act was repealed in 1943 but quotas remained in place until 1965. President Donald Trump's tariffs and entity list represent the latest round of exclusion which may succeed in delaying – but not derailing – China's development.

Michael Tai is professor of development studies at the Beijing Institute of Technology and author of US-China Relations in the 21st Century: A Question of Trust